TheScooterScoop

First, reduce a Honda Elite down to it’s bare essentials. Next reuse old street lamp covers, vacuums and what have you. At the end you have recycled a bunch of garbage to make a one-of-a-kind creation. The Junk Scooter! Sculpt Meister, and friend to found-parts, Nemo Gould has decided to take his work on the road, so to speak, with his new creation. He and Rich Humphrey are going to have a lot of ‘splaining to do when they roll up to the rally in this thing.

Hit the title link if you wanna see how this project started or check Nemo’s latest update is here if you want to catch up with it’s progress. Thanks to Kuroneko for the cool scoop!

Nemo G’s life is probably what would have happened to Anakin, had those meddling Jedi not showed up with their “Hokey religions and ancient superstitions”.

***UPDATE***
Looks like Illnoise and I were on the same wavelength today.

(weeee! It’s a myspace shot!)

Once again, another great rally experience. The PBSC did a great job putting together this one. We had nearly 100 people show up from all over… Dallas, Houston, Lubbock and more.

I didn’t take nearly enough photos, but I found some that others are sharing, with more to come. I think the key to what made this rally such a success was the rides. Hours of hills, twists, turns with hardly an incident. Sure, there were a couple of scrapes and some broken egos, but overall it was a bang-up ride. Big-ups to the ride organizers and to the sponsors, Austin Mopeds, The Royal Family (who’s site is experiencing a bit o’ difficulty as of this minute), ASC and TheScooterScoop (can you big yourself up? I suppose so).

We didn’t go ALL out with the Gymkhana, but we had a slow race. “The Dude”, from the Austin Hooligans Scooter Club took home first and Jeff got second. Congrats guys. Next year’s rally promises to be bigger and better!

Some photos I shot are HERE.
Other shared photos are HERE at Scoot.net
Coffeedrinks photos are HERE

Our good friend, Aki Hasegawa, in Japan has brought us the scoop on EICMA 2007. First here’s what he had to say about the show:

Hello Steve,
I just returned to Japan from Milan. This year I don’t have any interesting news from Milan other than Italjet showing the Dragster 250 and some other models (see photos).

I don’t have many photos from Italjet. Perhaps many visitors could not find Italjet in the show because they had a space on the second floor of the pavilion where the East Asia manufacturer’s space was. People would not expect to see Italjet there. There was only one Dragster and it was kept in a small side space (see photo).

The biggest shock to me is the Italian fuel price, 1.3 Euro per Liter, which is equivalent to US$7.229 per Gallon!

Even in Japan it is 140yen per liter which is about US$7.23 per gallon.
In Japan fuel price about 140yen/L =about 4.82US$ per gallon.
Diesel fuel price about 105yen/L =about 3.62US$ per gallon.

Thank you,
Aki

No, thank YOU!
He also sent us some shots of a couple of Dragster sprinters on the floor:

Aprilia showed off its Cargo Bike:

(it’s the ultimate grocery getter, eh?)

Arigato for the updates Aki! Great scoops!

Oh, one more thing, he found this interesting little scoot. Looks like a DiBlasi. I really dig the matching trailer! I’m sure it’s a historical piece.

Adam gave us a little scoop on some new MP3 accessories from Piaggio. I’ll let him tell you about it:

Yes, official Piaggio, apparently announced at EICMA. The press release described the roof as a “prototype”, along with a trailer, named the MP3 Wagon. No pictures of that one yet, far as I’ve seen. No release dates, either.

Hrm… A roof AND a trailer? Weird, wild stuff! I wonder if they will have a 4th wheel accessory and the pair-o-doors accessory next. Hehe, just teasin’. Thanks for that scoop Adam!

***UPDATE***
Here we see the MP3 Wagon (official Piaggio trailer accessory) that Adam was talking about along with the new, roof attachment:

Arigato to Aki for capturing this image at the EICMA show!

Here’s to David Harrington, host of the Just Gotta Scoot, for taking the time to let us plug this here scooter site.

Click on the title link to select any of the 31 fascinating and fun filled episodes or download Steve’s long winded episode #31 HERE. No, seriously… It’s the longest episode on there.

Will post more about the interview tonight after night 2 of Austin’s “Go to Hell” rally.

***UPDATE***
Ok, it’s 12:39am right now. I decided to head home early so I can make it through the day tomorrow. It was an interesting night tonight. I met some cool people, I caught up with some old friends, I made amends with other friends. The vibe felt a bit tense at first, but it started to mellow as the night progressed… that is until we rode past UT. If you like to fight, it’s as simple as riding a scooter on “the drag” after 9pm on a Friday or Saturday. You are GUARANTEED to hear at least 2 girls say “whoo hoo!” and at least 6 guys say “hey scooter fag! yeah, I’m talkin’ to you pussy” (or something there abouts). I know it’s not very peaceful of me, but I really do restrain myself from pulling up to one of these young, little wads of testosterone and “talking it over with them”. I think the only thing that really stops me, is the fear that they will kick my scooter over. That would be very sad indeed.

Tomorrow should be an even better day.

So, the interview. I really had fun! David H. is a very confident podcast personality. Very easy to talk to. I’m glad he didn’t ask me too many hard questions. If we would have gotten into geography or mathematics, I would have had to have hung up. Another thing about the guy is that he’s prolific! When we talked, he was JUST finishing up a prior podcast. Today, if you listed to one episode a day, it would take you at LEAST a month to get though all of his work. Makes my 3 videocasts look happenstance… like an accidental event… like “AHHHCHOO! Ooops, I made a video cast.” I hope I can pick up the pace, so I don’t get left behind in the -cast world.

Keep up the great work Dave!

If you wanna hear me blab about TheScooterScoop, check out the JustGottaScoot web interview NOW (it’s live).